Forthcoming imprints

DIPLI [ΔΙΠΛΗ]

ΔΙΠΛΗ [DIPLI (/dip’li/): literally: double (from Greek)]: The double telephone line is the way prisoners from different prisons communicate. Two to five prisoners from different prisons call the same telephone number at an arranged time. The owner of that telephone number, living outside prison, connects them together.

ΔΙΠΛΗ is a Common Notions imprint on social cannibalism. Funds raised go to political prisoners.

Social cannibalism is represents the lowest level of individualism of a fragmented society in which people, individually or in small groups, oppress and exploit others in their immediate social environment and within the confines of their daily action. Social cannibalism does not manifest itself immediately and completely but develops incrementally. It builds on existing social–class hierarchies, divisions and manipulations.

The term social cannibalism has been used by Greek anarchists in since 2011. Both the term and phenomenon of social cannibalism has spread; it is a contradiction (people that denounce violence accept it against those separated from them when executed by those connected to them); a pattern (parts of the proletariat face off against one another by turning oppression on oneself into stigmatization of the other); and continental context of austerity, crisis, and struggle (the Greek-Government Debt Crisis/Eurozone Crisis is homogenized according to nationality and moralized, internalized into guilt of one's worth as a person through the relationship between self and other, the shared representations of action, emotions, and the body).

The imprint aims to account for both the recent cycle of struggle in Greece (the defeat of the anti-memorandum mobilizations) and global capitalist restructuring today.

In recent years, we have witnessed, participated in, and have been inspired by a synchronicity of struggles and resonance of uprisings across the planet. Despite severe repression and wide ranging internal fissures within these struggles, it seems as if these energies recognize and enhance each other, becoming aware of their own shared immanance. Importantly, this is not led by the directives of any international organizations. Rather a planetary logic of struggle is at play.

The tacit premise of our aspiration for the better world has always been in the fact that in human history, people never stop their rebellion against oppression and injustice; but the current impetus of resonance seems to be surpassing that phase, by the tacit sign of a coming collective awareness of a planetary struggle. Certainly, as history consistently teaches us—recently with the examples of Egypt and Greece—there is no happy ending for regime change in any one country. And yet, on the global dimension, there is a sense of irreversibility in the insurrectionary impetus: people are rising up more frequently, widely and intensely; the simultaneity and reverberation are growing ever more dense and extensive.

All the same, the lives of planetary commoners are entrapped on all fronts by devastation which seems to be more or less centered around three epitomes of contemporary governance: debt (economic), violence (socio-political) and pollution (environmental). Within the planetary social body are many who are collectively reaching the limit of tolerance and taking the offensive in confronting a global network of power in varied forms, from political (armed resistance), to social (commune-building), to existential (exodus)—whose invisible nexus is gradually revealed by their own struggles and their subterraneous resonances.

The project we name ‘A/Planetary’ is to affirmatively engage in this precise situation and to grasp the impetus of the planetary reverberation—where it is going, and in what directions we would want it to go.

It takes the form of a common research project, wherein friends and comrades who live and fight in different locations on six continents of the planet exchange their experiences, analyses, communiqués, theories and all forms of discourse and enunciation they produce. Our hope is to create a collective intelligence of the planetary struggle by constantly making and remaking a cartography of inter-relations or interconnectivity of the living conditions, sufferings, struggles and aspirations of the people, as well as all of what social processes and relations currently compose such forces across so many coordinates. This is ultimately for mutual recognition and enhancement of local (which are also planetary) struggles—toward a situation wherein varied types of autonomous zones begin to take initiatives over large and larger surfaces of the planet.

A/Planetary will initially and primarily take a form of English-based website [aplanetary.org] to which groups of friends and comrades contribute, eventually and as possible including other languages. This will also be a place to collectively edit a book series, published by Common Notions.

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